The Box by Jeremy Brown (ebook reader play store txt) 📕

summer, when he and Kershaw and some others had pulled two and half million dollars out of an Escalade in the Financial District. As it turned out, the money belonged to an organization called The Labyrinth, and Bruder had kept his head down waiting to see if there was going to be any fallout from crossing them.

So far so good—they knew his face but not his name, not even an alias—and even though he still had plenty of his share from the job and several jobs prior, he was ready to get back to work.

“Convince me,” he said.

Rison said, “I was in a private card game with a group of guys, this thing we do whenever we’re all in LA at the same time. It’s mostly pros, but word gets around and sometimes we get some rich amateurs. Celebrities, Silicon Valley dorks, some organized crime but not too often. They have their own setups.”

Bruder took another drink of the beer.

Rison said, “But at this game about two weeks ago there was a guy named Tug. He—”

Bruder said, “Tug?”

“Yeah, that’s right. Tug.”

“Is that a nickname?”

“I don’t know. He was Romanian.”

“Romanian?”

Rison blinked. “Well, yeah, but that’s skipping ahead.”

Bruder sat back. “I’ll shut up.”

“So this Tug, he lost a lot of money. I mean, a lot. He talked a big game and thought he knew what he was doing, but he was coked up to his eyebrows and couldn’t focus, plus he kept showing his cards. Even without that, man, he was chum in the water. This one hand, he—”

“I don’t need the card details,” Bruder said.

“Right, right, sorry. It’s just, us card guys, we can geek out on that stuff all day.”

“He lost a lot of money,” Bruder said, getting things back on track.

Rison nodded.

“A lot. And he covered his debt, good for him, but he was torn up about it. He kept saying it was everything he had. He and I were sitting in this rooftop jacuzzi, big as a freaking bus, and we were the only ones left in the penthouse. This is like, four in the morning. Everybody else from the game had left. He would lean over and put his hand on my shoulder and in this thick accent—Romanian, like I said—‘Rison, my friend, I am as broke as a joke,’ then he’d laugh and cry at the same time. Over and over. I felt bad for him, but what are you gonna do?”

It was a rhetorical question, so Bruder didn’t answer.

Rison said, “And then he lays his head back on the edge of the jacuzzi and closes his eyes and goes, ‘Fuck, now I have to go to Iowa.’ I didn’t think I heard him right. Because Iowa, you know? Iowa? But then I think, oh, maybe there’s someplace back home that sounds like Iowa. Like, E-Y-E-O-J…whatever. So I go, ‘Where’s that?’ And you know what he said to me?”

Bruder waited.

“He goes, ‘It’s right in the middle of your fucking country, you idiot.’”

Then Rison burst out laughing and drank the rest of his beer. A server in shorts and a bikini top strolled past the front of the cabana and pointed at the ice bucket with raised eyebrows.

Rison said, “We’re good for now sweetie, but can we get some food? Some of those barbecue sliders, and the fruit plate thing.”

“You bet, hot shot.”

The server, a pro, glanced at Bruder and saw there was no point in chatting him up for a bigger tip and moved on.

Bruder said, “Iowa.”

Rison cracked another beer for himself.

“Right, Iowa. I ask him why in the hell he has to go to Iowa. And he starts rambling about his cousins and uncles and farms and I’m thinking, boy oh boy, this poor bastard is so broke, he has to go back to his family farm and shovel cow shit until he gets back on his feet. I almost felt bad about taking his money.”

A group of young women with pale skin and full drinks shuffled past, looking for a place to set up camp. Bruder could see the lingering marks from an airplane neck pillow on one of their cheeks.

Rison called out to them, “Not now ladies, but come back here in one hour. One hour!”

They laughed and leaned into each other to make comments, but most of them looked back and Bruder made a note to be gone within the hour.

Rison leaned back and said, “So he’s yammering on about farms and shit, and then he said something that set off some alarm bells. Maybe you have this too—it’s like a program running in the background, a passive monitoring system, and it’s always listening and watching. Maybe somebody says something, or you notice somebody come and go through a side door and now you know it isn’t locked. Or you see a security guard with their holster all jacked up, like pushed around to the back, and you know that damn gun is welded in there with cobwebs and the person toting it around sure as shit never pulled it, let alone fired it. The monitoring system notices stuff like that and you go, huh…”

“Sure,” Bruder said. He wouldn’t call his version of it passive, but he knew what Rison was talking about.

“Well Tug says this one thing, and my system starts going off like a slot machine. Bing, bong, bing!”

Bruder wondered if Rison was going to get to it before the pale horde returned.

Rison said, “Tug, he goes, ‘The boys in Chicago would never notice a missing bag.’”

He raised his eyebrows at Bruder to emphasize how intriguing the statement was.

“But the way he said it was kind of rueful, like he knew that was bullshit. The boys in Chicago, whoever they were, would absolutely notice a missing bag and Tug knew it. And at this point he has my full attention but I don’t want to spook him. So I say something lame and distracted, like, ‘A bag of what, manure? Ha ha ha.’”

Rison leaned forward with his elbows